The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [82]
And I didn’t want Unc holding on from behind, because he was a liar, too, scared of the truth, scared of telling me what I was: his bastard son.
Unc. Even the name was a lie.
We came through the blackberry thicket, ducked beneath another low live-oak branch, and then the ground changed, rose up at a sharp incline before us, and I saw past and above it the tops of trees on the other side.
The railroad track bed.
We were on the other side of it from where we’d been yesterday, looking at Cleve Ravenel’s tire tracks, trying to figure where they’d gone once they disappeared.
He’d gone over the track bed, of course. Then down to this parcel of land on Hungry Neck, and now I knew where we were, my bearings turning and falling into line, and all of it hit me: Trestle Road was on the other side of the track bed, and we could make our way from there to Levee and to Lannear, and back to the trailer.
Two and a half miles.
“What is it?” Unc whispered, and I heard him behind me take a deep breath in through his nose, smelling.
“The track bed,” I said. Mom bent over, took in breaths, but kept her hand in mine.
I let it go.
“Now we know where we are,” Unc whispered, his hand still on my belt. He paused, breathed hard a couple times. “Let’s go on up.”
We made it to the top, a good thirty feet up, and here we were, on the flat track, rails all gone. Just this strange piece of ground in the middle of the woods, no trees, no bushes. Only gravel, stretching away to either side of us.
To the left the track bed led off into woods, the bed a straight line shrouded by trees on either side and finally disappearing in the black.
I looked to the right. There a few yards away stood Mom, breathing hard, hands to her knees again. She didn’t look up at me, only breathed.
And not fifty yards past her was where the track bed ended at the bluff on the bank of the Ashepoo, the view from here like a window away from my life.
The bluff, where I’d ridden my bike when I was little, back when I’d believed myself to be somebody else. Somebody I wasn’t, and’d never been. The Ashepoo, where I’d stop, look both ways up and down the river bending away from me on both sides, the trees right up to this side of the river like giant men on horseback watching over all the marsh.
The bluff, where just yesterday Unc and I’d been, me somebody else.
Dead-man talk, Thigpen’d called it, and I knew that was me, the dead man. Dead to who I thought I’d been, and dead to who I knew I was: Unc’s son, all along.
“Huger!” Unc whispered hard, and pulled at me, that hand on my belt. “Run!”
I heard next the sound Unc’d already heard, the distant crash through brush back to my left, where now Thigpen and the horse rose up from the woods maybe a hundred yards away. Here they were, the dark figure of that horse mounting the incline, on it the slumped figure of Thigpen, still with an arm out, that gun pointed toward us, and they were coming at us.
Run where? We were here, and I was dead already. I was dead.
So I turned to him, full on. I held up the shotgun, still nothing in my hands save for the cold of it, and I fired.
The sound and flash were nothing, too, nor was the slam against my shoulder, the kick once fired. It was a pump-action .410, the kick at any other time in my life enough to jar my spine. But nothing happened. Only blast, light, kick, all in this instant.
Mom screamed, and Unc pulled hard at my belt, because still here came Thigpen, and I’d missed altogether.
I pumped it, felt the action only go halfway down, then stop. The gun jammed, the cartridge caught on its way out of the chamber.
Thigpen laughed. “Got the clutch way open,” he called out. “For targets close in!”
Unc pulled harder on my belt again, and now he was leading, me nearly stumbling for the angle he held me at, and now here was Mom running, too,